Tuesday, 27 October 2009

"Hold on there, baby, while I hide the bicycle pump from thieves... mmmHHMMMMM..."

I had completely forgotten about this, but was reminded by Mr Fishwife yesterday: if you listen very carefully to Let's Get It On by Marvin Gaye, as it's starting fading out and he's crooning seductive words of LERVE to his lucky laydeee, there is DEFINITELY the sound of one of those parpy parpy clown bicycle horns. Seriously. Every time I hear it I imagine he's suggestively honking the horn on his Grifter as he parks it behind the garage and starts taking his cycle clips off. Thank you, Mr F, for actually making me laugh out loud.

Monday, 26 October 2009

Currently, for some reason, I seem to be running on a very short fuse. Things that normally I would allow to wash over me are annoying me more than is strictly reasonable. And bizarrely a lot of them seem to be musical. There are too many songs out there that aren't trying hard enough. I'm aware this is very subjective so I apologise in advance if any of them is your personal favourite, but the tetch demands to be released...

1) Songs that fail to live up to the initial promise of the introWell, at the moment just the one: Sweet Child Of Mine by Guns and Roses. A sublime introduction that promises great things. And then, after a perfectly OK but not special set of verses and choruses, winds down to a dreary "we can't decide what to do with the end of this and are even singing about it... where do we go where do we go where do we go...". Poor effort all round, Mr Rose, must try harder.

2) Songs that are totally let down by an inappropriately jaunty bitHere Comes The Night by Them/Van Morrison. What went wrong here? Excellent intro. Excellent chorus. And then the verse has a ridiculously misplaced Benny Hill oompah quality to it. Every time I hear it I want, in a Frankenstein way, to rip out the verses and replace them with something from the Doors.Spirit Of Radio by Rush, and Jane by Jefferson Starship. What was wrong with those post-prog people?? Why couldn't they leave things alone and not meddle? These songs are the musical equivalent of a cake that has been iced, decorated, and then iced some more, and then soaked in rum, and then served in a lettuce basket with a smoked salmon garnish. Although when I say "smoked salmon garnish" I mean "startlingly embarrassing misguided reggae-style bridge". There's a point in the middle where you actually have the feeling that you're watching your father breakdance at a wedding. Dear God, somebody stop the horror.

3) Songs that are just downright lazy and were phoned in by artists too complacent to care if their work was sub-standard or notDo I need to say any more than All You Need Is Love by the Beatles? Combining a dirgey sub-Maharishi melody with the most offensive tuba-driven chorus, this resembles nothing so much as a badly-organised minibus singalong on a mental hospital's Chessington day out. Except the singers aren't even pretending they're enjoying themselves. The wah-wah-wawah-waaaah trombone on the chorus sounds like the incidental music from a Carry On film, where Charles Hawtrey has just put on a hat full of custard. Poor, poor, poor.

That's all for now. There'll be more. I haven't even started on the worrying tendency to try to make things youth-accessible by adding rap sections yet.

Saturday, 10 October 2009

So the bookselling world rejoices in the extremely well-deserved Booker win of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. A marvellous and thoroughly absorbing read (as opposed to "absorbent" - Dan Brown's entire oeuvre springs to mind). And once again, a situation arises that any bookseller out there will be wearily familiar with. What, I ask the rest of you, would most people do on hearing that a book has been given a prize? Why, they may wish to buy it, or if not actually buy it, to pick it up and leaf through a few pages. So what do the publishers do, with distressing and lemming-like regularity, in the face of this sudden burst of publicity and interest? They re-issue the book with the words "Winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize" on the front cover. And while the book is being thus reissued, it is usually impossible to get copies. Which means that a good percentage of people who might otherwise have bought the book in a frenzy of literary good will, unable to get a copy right now this minute, may change their minds and not buy it at all. Seriously, has no publisher ever thought that it might be a good idea (and a huge financial saving) simply to print rolls of stickers saying "Winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize" and send them out to bookshops/distributors etc? I can't possibly be the only person who's had this idea...

Saturday, 3 October 2009

There's a time when you really have to take a deep breath and shout "SENSE OF PROPORTION" at yourself, preferably aloud so you worry that the neighbours might have heard; hopefully you are therefore less likely to do it again. It happened to me this morning, when I was vaguely considering making chicken soup for lunch and found, to my horror, no chicken stock in the freezer. Imagine that. Appalling. I was brought up with a very Nigel Slater "get the most out of a meal" ethic - you never throw a roast chicken carcass away without first having stripped all remaining meat off for sandwiches, and having boiled the bones for stock, which then ends up as peculiar unlabelled bags in the freezer. At one point there were six, which was fine. But evidently we have eaten a lot of soup recently, hence the shocking stock drought. Good God, am I going to have to use (gasp) Knorr????? Pause for deep zen breathing and a lie down.The Slater ethic has now filled my freezer and half my fridge with suspiciously anonymous bowls of whatnot. I acquired a Sharpie recently (the finest indelible write-anywhere marker in the world, excellent for surreptitiously correcting spelling on laminated airplane instruction cards) but the problem is that being indelible it can't be, obviously, erased - so Tupperware boxes have multiple scribbled-out messages on them that read "apple sauce, NO, RATATOUILLE tomato soup 1994". Items are only readily identifiable when defrosted, and sometimes leftover beef stew doesn't add a great deal to a fruit cake. A nice woman came into the shop the other week and (this happens a lot in Barnes) said "Does anybody want a bag of windfalls? We've got too many." And like the freezer-stuffing fool I am, I took two. Some painful hours of peeling, coring and throwing away the bruised half of each apple ensued - I now have six bags of apple sauce in the freezer too. Would it have been so hard to say no?I should really point out that none of this is the sign of great virtue - it's further proof of my insidious OCD. I so can't bear to throw food away that sometimes I even put things in the freezer in order to avoid putting them in the bin. A couple of weeks ago I bought what I stupidly thought was a bunch of chard at the rip-off farmers' market up the road - of course it turned out to be pak choi, which don't get me wrong is fine, but even Sainsbury's has it. I wanted chard, with cheese sauce. Having chopped it up, washed it, and even blanched it, I was forced to accept the inevitable - I now had a saucepan full of limp Chinese cabbage. So I froze it. It's still there, silently reproaching me. Maybe one day I'll get it out and do something faintly repulsive with it. I even labelled the bag "CHARD JUST DEFROST AND COOK WITH CHEESE SAUCE actually it might be pak choi". What am I hoping for? That it may just morph into chard through the power of positive thinking? Or that Mr Fishwife will throw it away when he can't fit some hot cross buns in the second drawer down? I need help. Or, failing that, a bigger freezer. It could be worse - Mantua Maker was staying the other week, and raving about the delights of the huge freezer she and Professor MM have acquired - "We needed a larger one because we're involved in this pork scheme with another couple" she said (I can only assume this isn't a Northern euphemism for swinging). At least nobody has tried to involve me and Mr Fishwife in a pork scheme.

Today (13th May 2016) I am mostly:

wondering if I can get to Tesco's and back for a sandwich without missing the afternoon book delivery (what are the odds)

reading "Archie" (the reboot of the 60s comic) by Mark Waid (Daredevil) and Fiona Staples (Saga). I was never, I should add in self-defence, an Archie fan, but the idea of it being all Sunnydaled up is intriguing. If you're a nerd.

wearing "Lys Mediterranee" by Frederic Malle. It's like I've beaten you to death with a bunch of lilies, and you liked it.

unable to stop singing "Cielito Lindo" (aka "the AI YI YI YIII song"), thanks to a violin-playing busker who has been playing variants of it outside for the last 4 hours.

About Me

A veritable dustbin of sparkly factoids. Don't let the fact that I smoke Gauloises put you off. It's a habit, not an indication of moral turpitude. I like anything in a martini glass too.
I used to say I hated politics, sport and reality TV. Then the Olympics happened. Now I just hate politics and reality TV.
My favourite quote is "Why must you tell me all your secrets when it's hard enough to love you knowing nothing?" (Lloyd Cole, for you Google searchers). Optimist by nature, pessimist by experience. Oh, and I'm a ginger.

Strange and oddly unrelated Google searches by which people have found my blog...

"pork pie sexual encounters"

"its hard to say words that is not final because many things happen in between"

"Fodens reliable ant"

"my wife say to ex i love you and to me say i love you"

"Frankie Boyle 2p sausage"

"crayon book pictures channelled whelk"

and a special apology to anyone who came here following the promise "Lucy has one of the hottest racks on the planet", IT'S NOT ME. THAT'S A WHOLE OTHER WEBSITE. Although my rack is epic in its own smalltown way.

Perfumes I may bankrupt myself buying one day.

He's one of us!!

Now I love him even more. If it turns out he also likes calvados, Nabokov and the TV works of Aaron Sorkin (what are the odds?) I will in fact lay down my life for him.

Role models I channel when necessary

Miss Prothero in "A Child's Christmas In Wales" by Dylan Thomas : "She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, "Would you like anything to read?" "

My mother the librarian, who can express displeasure with a very slight widening of the eyes. Invaluable for dealing with the general public.

My late paternal grandmother, a woman who consumed nothing but untipped Senior Service and gin 'n' sherry (aka "alkie's delight") and once drove down a 1:3 hairpin bend in her Reliant Robin with both hands in the air cackling "Of course, I'm COMPLETELY pissed".

Eleanor of Aquitaine - brought literature and table manners to Britain. And a fellow ginger.

Miss Jones from "Rising Damp". ...."Oh, Mr Rigsby, the music's gone to my head like wine!!!"

Lady Colin Campbell

Gertrude Elizabeth Blood, 1857 - 1911. I go and say hello to Gertie Lady C every time I'm near the National Portrait Gallery. The perspective is all wrong, but she's just daring you to have a go. A raised eyebrow says more than a thousand sarcastic put-downs.

Sei Shonagon (c.966 - 1017)

...also a big fan of pointless lists of things, although I have never reached the giddy heights of "Things that look a bit pathetic".

Esteemed Colleagues

Booksellers Anonymous

"Well, to be honest, after years of smoking and drinking, you do sometimes look at yourself and think...You know, just sometimes, in between the first cigarette with coffee in the morning to that four hundredth glass of cornershop piss at 3am, you do sometimes look at yourself and think...this is fantastic. I'm in heaven." - Bernard from Black Books

Fictional men I have had a crush on (in chronological order)

Asterix. I wrote a proposal of marriage, to me, from him, in yellow crayon and presented it to my mother. I was 4 at the time.

Snufkin.

Prince Gwydion of the Sons of Don.

Ged, aka Sparrowhawk, the Wizard of Earthsea (well, one of them).

Tintin. What can I say? I was 6.

Mr Knightley from "Emma". So much more appealing than the rebarbative and snotty Mr Darcy. Always marry your best friend.

Brat Farrar.

Steve Carella of the 87th Precinct.

Tom Ripley, eponymous hero of the Patricia Highsmith series. Not sure if I love him or secretly want to be him (how liberating would it be to just murder some complete stranger on a train because their clothes annoy you a bit?) Envy his cute french wife though.

Amit Chatterji. Honestly, how was he not the most suitable boy?????????

John Constantine, the old Hellblazer himself. Well, it'd be rude not to. He's hot! He's scruffy! He's British! He's a warlock! And he smokes! Although the fact that he seems only to smoke Silk Cut makes him oddly wussy.

Charlie Parker - not the jazz musician, the private eye from "Every Dead Thing" et al. Traumatised. Psychic. Mind you the fact that I have a crush on John Connolly, the author, may have a bearing on this.

Berry Rydell from "Virtual Light". Endearingly shambolic.

King Mob from "The Invisibles". Buff, bald, a trained assassin, and an inveterate quoter of The Kinks.

Dexter Morgan, unapologetic (nay, gleeful) serial killer from "Darkly Dreaming Dexter". The TV series got him wrong, even if it was great viewing. Should have been Brendan Fraser.

"Angel" by Thierry Mugler. Vile. Smells of the cat-hair-covered toffee you find down the back of the sofa. Also of ageing and desperate cabin crew.

The "Toast" catalogue. Smells of linseed oil and old haddock. WHY??? What are they printing it on? Or with???

Wet Barbour jackets, and don't kid yourself otherwise, Tarquin.

Things people do that make me want to slap them.

Shout "I can't believe you're doing this to me" at a traffic warden who is, usually deservedly, giving them a ticket. Believe it, love, the evidence is right before you.

Preface a question with "Question!"

Get grumpy about "too much choice" in bookshops etc. What the hell does "too much choice" mean??? I've started saying cheerfully "Absolutely! Bring in a totalitarian Communist state and you'll just have one book which you'll HAVE to read!"

Sulk. Irritating in a small child, positively BACKWARD in anyone over 15.

Use phrases like "it's not in my skill set" when they mean "I'm too idle/self-important to learn". Lucinda Ledgerwood, come on dowwwwwn!!